The Loft Above the Shop
Dad answered on the second ring, the way he always does, like he has been sitting next to the phone since 1974 waiting for it.
“What’s wrong,” he said. Not a question. My dad is seventy. He framed houses in this part of Minnesota for forty years before his knees quit on him, and he can hear trouble in two words.
I told him all of it. The envelope, the six hundred dollars, the basketball, the promise I didn’t make. He let me talk and didn’t say anything until I was done.
“And you want to know if you can make that loft into a room,” he said.
“I didn’t say that,” I said.
“You called me at ten at night,” he said. “You weren’t calling to ask about the Vikings.”
I laughed for the first time all night. “Can we?” I asked.
He was quiet for a second, and I could hear him thinking.
“Saturday,” he said. “Seven. Have the coffee on. And go to the county Thursday and get a permit, because I’m not building a bedroom for my grandson that some inspector is going to make us tear out.”
I went to the county building office on Thursday on my lunch hour. The woman at the counter was named Barb, and she had been there as long as I could remember. She pulled out the forms and slid them across.
“Habitable space in an accessory building,” she said, reading over my sketch. “You’ll need an egress window, smoke and carbon monoxide alarms, a fire-rated separation from the shop, a real stair with a handrail, and heat that isn’t a space heater.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
She looked up at me over her glasses. “This for your boy?”
I didn’t know how she knew, and then I remembered that in a town of eighteen hundred people, everybody knows whose boy is whose.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said again.
She stamped the application and wrote a number on the top. “The inspector is Dale,” she said. “He’ll want to see the framing before you cover it. Call me when you’re ready, and I’ll get him out quick.”
Dad showed up Saturday at six fifty with a thermos of his own coffee, because he does not trust mine. He was wearing the same thing he has worn on every job of his life: canvas work pants, a plaid flannel, and his old suspenders.
We spent the first morning just clearing out the loft: tires, a box of my mother’s Christmas ornaments, a broken snowblower and twenty years of shop junk.
That afternoon we looked at the bones. Dad got down on his bad knees and checked every joist with a flashlight, and he did not like what he found.
“These are two-by-eights on twenty-four-inch centers,” he said. “That’s fine for tires. That’s not fine for a sixteen-year-old boy who jumps off his bed. We sister every one of these with a two-by-ten, and we put in a center beam.”
So that was weekend one: tearing out, measuring, and ordering lumber. The lumberyard in town delivered on Monday. The bill was a little over three thousand dollars, and I put it on the card I keep for shop parts.
The second weekend we sistered the joists and set a new beam. Dad called out the cuts, and I made them. He measured every board twice and complained about nothing except my radio station.
Around noon we sat on the tailgate eating ham sandwiches Kelly had sent out. Kelly is my girlfriend. We have been together a year and a half.
“Can I ask you something,” Dad said, wiping his mouth.